The last days of the Irish Country House

A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne

edited by Robert O’Byrne, (Messenger Publications, €25.00 / £17.99)

This is the latest album of images to be culled from the astonishing Fr  Francis  Browne Collections; it is also by far the best. The images, derived directly from the digitalised negatives, are crisp and clear, and also perfectly reproduced, which has not always been the case in the past.

Today Fr Browne, born in 1880 in Cork, is recognised as Ireland’s greatest ever photographic artist, the equal of Robert Doisneau, Cartier Bresson,  or Jacques Henri Lartigue. Like them he could capture through his instinctive talent and long application, not only the critical moment,  but also the most formal composition. In this album the emphasis is on the formal, which is exactly the correct mode for capturing the fugitive sense of the last years of  some of Ireland’s great houses.

Here for once the excellence of the images had been joined with an informative  and well researched text by cultural historian Robert O’Byrne, a former vice-president of the Irish Georgian Society. It seems that Fr Browne worked to a detailed programme in making these records over a period of  many years.

These days, when anything can be forgiven a genius it seems, we learn that this was  not the case with Fr Browne. Photography was for him an avocation; his true vocation was as a Jesuit priest. His vows came before all else, as the few surviving letters he wrote to his Father Provincial show.  Fr Browne devoted much of his time to giving “missions” in places all over the country. He was a much sought after preacher, it is recorded.

In most of the houses all the accumulations of the centuries are on display”

Famous now for his photograph taken on the first stage of the Titanic’s doomed voyage in 1912, he was offered a ticket to go on to America, but on asking permission of his Provincial, received a peremptory telegram,  “GET OFF THAT SHIP. PROVINCIAL”, which he did, saving his own life and images of that doomed vessel.

For some the great houses of rural Ireland were equally doomed. Many of them have not survived.  Some have been turned into grand hotels. A very few remain in private hands, but not always the hands of the families who once built them.

In all Robert O’Byrne’s essays describe in sufficient detail some 20 houses, though in all some twenty three are imaged. (One of these was not a country house at all, but Mespil House, the suburban mansion of artist Sarah Purser, demolished in 1951.)

In most of the houses all the accumulations of the centuries are on display. I was especially moved by the images of so many libraries, shelf upon shelf of books, that arouse the  possessive instinct of the bibliophile: what were these books, where are they now, have they a good home, are they being looked after?)

O’Byrne alludes casually to Fr Browne wandering with his camera from room to room. But that is clearly not the case. All these images are carefully thought out, lit, and photographed: we are seeing a very great artist at work, not a casual dilettante.

These great houses are called “a vanishing world”, and so they were. Yet images of those who lived in them are only given for three.   One of them is the rarest of rarities: a photograph of Mr T. Brookes, the Butler at Dunsany Castle, in 1950.

Lords

His employer Lord Dunsany was a man of unusual views: when he went out to dinner anywhere he brought him with a special health salt to use at the table, which he would recommend to those sitting beside him, one of whom was an astonished Sean O’Faolain.

Mr Hudson has to stand in here for all those people who kept these houses going, ready to serve “the family” as well as they could, but out of a sense of something more than feudal connection.

Two Lords appear: the 5th Lord Dunraven of Adare Manor.  (No word here of the family’s interest in psychical research – O’Bryne will have no truck it seems with aristocratic  eccentricity.)

The other is the 12th and last Earl of Fingall, one of the Catholic Plunkett’s, the family of St Oliver Plunkett;  the Plunketts at Dunsany were the Protestant branch, who supplied the Episcopalian Archbishop of Dublin, whose statue still stands in Kildare Place, gazing with a puzzled expression at the Department of Industry and Commerce across the road.

A line from a play of Yeats came into my mind looking at these images: “Study that house.  I think upon its jokes and stories, I try to remember what the butler said to a drunken game keeper…”

Yes, indeed,  this is a lost world. But we should keep in mind studying these images that they are all, everyone one of them the creation of a deeply spiritual man, as true a humanist as his French contemporaries.  We should not jump too quickly to judgements about what he intended.